The Most Important Email and Chat Rule

Many businesses seem to treat email or other online communications from their customers as something they are forced to accept instead of realizing that they are possibly the greatest ways ever developed of getting customer feedback. The ease of sending email or typing out a brief chat message may mean you end up getting a lot of nonsensical questions that people wouldn't bother you with if they had to send you a postal letter or pick up a phone to ask, but keeping a close eye on customer email or chat can give you useful input which you might not get any other way. Even "stupid" questions may be telling you that your Web site or other material needs to be revised so that customers understand it better, or even that your products need to be redesigned so that they are easier to use.

An email address like "[e-mail]" can give you the online equivalent of a high-priced marketing study without any direct expense at all.

Monitoring outside email lists related to your business can give you even more feedback.

Investor relations people now routinely read through online discussions about their companies' stocks. You can and should also monitor online product and service discussions, especially email lists that relate to your business in some way. These lists, and associated Web site and online bulletin board discussions, can serve not only as the most unbiased feedback sources you could ever hope to find, but also as a source of information about your competitors.

It takes time and patience to gather and interpret mounds of email, chat, and other incoming online information. If you don't have time to do it yourself, hire someone who does. If your business is generating enough online feedback and discussion that it takes more than a few minutes a day to process all of it, that feedback is important enough to be worth paying someone to read, absorb, and summarize for you. For a large company, several salaries spent monitoring online discussions can save millions in potential losses by catching and allowing management to respond to just one false product or financial rumor before it spreads beyond a small email group into the mainstream media. The same is true for smaller businesses, although on a smaller scale, and instead of salaries spent it may be the owner's time.

Web sites and newsletters are how you talk to customers. Email is how customers talk to you. If you fail to listen, you are throwing away half the advantage of using the Internet in your business.

If there is any one rule for using the Internet as a business tool that you should paste up on your office wall, let it be this one:

"The Internet is a dialogue, not a monologue."